


Bumper's Last Stand

by Tierfal



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Humor, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-05
Updated: 2010-12-05
Packaged: 2017-10-13 13:04:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/137668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Staring at the lights makes his head hurt – but then, most things do, the Doctor included.  The Doctor most of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bumper's Last Stand

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sister fic of To Dive Into the Fire, because apparently I needed to explore the same ideas again, revolving around candy instead of literature. Blame the Lyceum Theatre for selling Jelly Babies at intermission, because it was the first time Eltea and I had them, and this wasn't long to follow. And thank Eltea for asking me to read parts of it aloud to her as I wrote them, as that's why I actually finished it. XD
> 
> Warnings: mild sexytimes; yet ANOTHER S3 Master-as-a-bad-companion AU

The Master bites the head off of a pink Jelly Baby. Viciously. Even though the pink ones are his favorites.

The Doctor toddles around to the other side of the console, patting and petting and stroking levers and globes and gears, and it’s all the Master can do not to leap on him and bite down on _his_ neck.

Or elsewhere.

Anywhere.

This Doctor is flesh and bone, but _what_ flesh, and _what_ bone; he must taste like a symphony sounds.

Or perhaps, the Master muses, drumming his fingers on the scarred, scorched leather of the jumpseat he occupies, the Doctor will taste like silence.

Either way, the Master is starving slowly—and why? Why does he always? Because he has reached out and had his hand slapped away so many times it stings when he shifts his wrist. He has learned his lesson about the Doctor, has learned that commonality and possession are equally meaningless, that history is just a list of dates to some members of his species. He has learned that this Doctor, more than any previous incarnation, insists on solitude—that he seeks out human “friends,” tows them along like iron chains, and then pushes them away when he needs them most. He has learned that this Doctor is a mangled wreck beneath bright brown eyes, a brighter grin, and hectic hair. He has learned that he can’t see enough, love enough, be enough to try to fix it all; and he has learned that the Doctor obsesses over others’ pain and trivializes his own; he has learned that the Doctor is trapped inside his head and his hurt, and drawing him out might require going so deep that the Master would lose himself as well.

It’s not fair, he thinks, that they’re both insane. It’s not fair that they’re both ruined and broken like this—this is the Master’s burden. It always was; it always has been; he’s the one who exists, who subsists, on the precipice. The Doctor can’t live like that. He shouldn’t have to. They’re not supposed to be the same; they’re meant to balance each other, not to fall apart together or at once, in opposition and in perfect symmetry.

The Master decapitates a red Jelly Baby, this time by pulling its head off slowly and deliberately, getting red ooze all over his fingers. One of the very, very few pleasantries of this arrangement is the fact that the Doctor has what seems to be an endless supply of Jelly Babies, all in their original Earth 1970s packaging, in a cabinet in the kitchen. Every time the Master opens it, new bags of Jelly Babies have appeared to replace the ones he last took, to the extent that it would be really sort of creepy if it wasn’t so convenient.

He’s not sure—well, he’s never sure—if the Doctor is actually fixing things on the console or just pretending to. There’s a lot of pretense with the two of them, and a lot of denial, and so much crushed down and buried but not forgotten that it’s all festered below the surface, so deep they blame the infection on other things.

Or maybe it’s just him. Maybe he can’t read the man who was Theta once, and his extrapolations are all wishful thinking—wishes that they’re still compatible now. Still tied, after all the things they’ve done to each other in the name of hate and the spirit of something much more complicated and much more real.

He’s just bitter. Bitter like black coffee, bitter like all the things this tongue no longer wants to taste.

It’s not his fault. The only thing he understands now, the only thing that makes sense, is revenge—is making the Doctor listen, making the Doctor squirm, making the Doctor suffer, making the Doctor cry. Retaliating. Reciprocating. Making the Doctor hurt until he realizes what he did. What he’s done. What he still does, every day and now.

The Master wanted to make him jealous. He wanted to make him seethe. He wanted to make him angry or wretched or _anything_. He wanted to move him, to move the monument of good.

He wanted control again. Of them. Of their half-shattered, still electrifying link. He wanted to be the one leading, the one deciding, the one commanding. He’d missed that.

But of course it was different. Like every time before, it was a fight instead of a collaboration. Cacophony. Garbage.

The Master leans his head back against the seat and stares at the lights.

Staring at the lights makes his head hurt—but then, most things do, the Doctor included. The Doctor most of all. If he doesn’t stop thinking about the Doctor, he’s going to end up on a killing spree, and not just of Jelly Babies this time.

Speaking of Jelly Babies, Boofuls just smiled his last smug, powdery little smile.

The Master rummages in his pocket for the toothpick he picked up two days ago when he was bored at the restaurant infested with mechanical spiders (and biological ones that had endured so much radiation you could hardly tell them apart). Then he stabs the toothpick into Boofuls’s head, right through the eye, and admires his handiwork.

“You’re sick,” the Doctor says airily, spinning a little wheel and squinting at his viewscreen.

“It’s my nature,” the Master replies, managing not to sigh at the stupid nonsense they say to each other now. “Always has been.”

The Doctor shrugs a little, uncomfortably, a movement like a jerk on the strings of a marionette. The Master wants to cut those strings and watch him crumple.

And maybe—just maybe—breaking him entirely could purge him of the slow-killing sickness.

So the Master pops Boofuls in his mouth, eats him off the toothpick, stabs it into the stuffing of the seat, and stands. He crosses to the Doctor, shoves him hard against the TARDIS console, and kisses him harder, with a mouthful of murdered Jelly Baby.

The Doctor shoves at his chest, then tries to leverage the heel of one hand against his throat, then writhes against him, accidentally pushes their hips together, whimpers into the kiss, and desperately starts giving back.

The Master licks his lips— _his_ lips—both of their lips—and fists one hand in the Doctor’s hair, grasping the paisley tie with the other. The tie is coming off. It’s all coming off. And then the Master will have what’s his again.

He drags the Doctor backward by the tie, narrowly missing a painful collision with the jumpseat, navigating suspiciously easily without breaking the contact. Either he’s more of a genius even than he’d previously realized, or the TARDIS has also acknowledged that the Doctor needs this and will never get it on his own.

Blindly he hauls them into the bedroom the Doctor has allotted him, which has an isomorphic deadlock seal to ensure that the only things the Master can do unsupervised are sleeping and showering. (He used to be able to watch television, but first there was the incident with only speaking in soap opera quotes, and then there was juryrigging the wires into a makeshift taser. The Master is not actually sure which was the decisive rebellion.) Despite its spartan furnishings, including the spartan minibar and the spartan jacuzzi tub, this room will be vastly superior to the Doctor’s, which the Master presumes for a fact is full of geeky books, crumpled takeaway rubbish, and prudish vibes. The Master’s petitions for handcuffs welded to the bedframe and a full-length mirror on the ceiling have gone woefully unheeded, but yes—his humble abode will certainly suffice.

Humbly, then, the Master whips the Doctor around by the tie, shoves him down onto the unmade bed, and climbs up over him, planting a knee on either side of his hips. The Doctor whines softly, writhing, and then reaches up to fumble for a grip on the Master’s Jelly-Baby-powdery Oxford. Apparently the operation of complex mechanisms like shirt buttons has escaped him, because he just pulls, hard.

The Master leans forward and kisses him again, savoring it, and doesn’t mind the host of fist-made wrinkles.

And it’s natural, he thinks, both hearts pounding in complement. It was inevitable all along, from the beginning, from the first moment they breathed the same Malcassairo air with these matched lungs, from the phone call, from the eye contact, from touching him, even through the fabric; touching him and confirming him, solidifying his existence here. If they are on the same soil, the same planet, under the light of one star, they’ll find each other, whether they will it or no. They’re magnetic opposites—two poles drawn together, atomically attracted, inescapably linked. That’s not a link that can be broken, least of all by one of them.

Or that’s what some part of the Master believes, some thinking bit that won’t accept the reason given by the rest of him—that he wants the Doctor so badly he won’t hear any answer short of “Yes, please.”

This collision has been building for centuries—since the first time they parted, bitter and broken but still so stupid, so young. They’re snapping back like a rubber band. They’ve been pulling against it for so long, stretching away from each other, trying to break the circle, but they can’t. Maybe neither of them ever really wanted to.

The Master never wanted to. Koschei never did. And another part of him, a part still curled up and wounded, wants to keep clawing at the Doctor’s eyes, ripping off the skins, shredding the layers, erasing the time, until Theta reappears to apologize. To take him back. To take him in, envelop him, fulfill him, heal all of the old, settled scars. He could. If anyone can fix old hurts, it’s the Doctor—the greatest Doctor in a thousand universes, as the Master has always known and never said aloud.

All his. Always his. His at last.

And he intends to take advantage of that.

So he does.

Apparently riding the Doctor is like riding a bicycle, because he hasn’t forgotten a thing, and it’s just like it was—just as easy, just as intuitive, just as _right_. The Master has accepted more than his share of injustices, and it’s mighty fine to be on top for once.

As it were.

And the Doctor shifts and curls and mews and cries, and it’s downright melodic. They sweat, and they arch in unison, and they dissolve until they nearly merge; it’s all hands and mouths and hips that snap together like magnets on a string, and the only thing either of them can think of is pleasing the other progressively more. It’s pure, somehow. It’s warm. The Master doesn’t hold back, doesn’t play nice, doesn’t resist the urge to bite and squeeze and press a little harder than gentleness would permit, but it’s still generous in some way. They’ve reverted, to some degree, and the comfort and the trust and the gratification that belong to _then_ have broken through nine hundred years of petty pas de deux for _now_. Enough of it is still in them. And if—when—the underlying care runs as deep now as it did then, they open to one another like blossoms in the light.

Or like John Hurt’s torso when the thing explodes out of him in “Alien.”

Yes, more like that.

And it’s only nostalgia, of course, that coaxes the Master to collapse onto the tangled sheets beside his _yang_. It’s respect for the past that makes him reach out and ruffle the Doctor’s insane new hair and then push at his head for good measure.

“Nnmmgh,” the Doctor says, and the Master’s stomach does strange things entirely different from the strange things that preceded jumping this man and climaxing into him, because post-coital incoherency is another throwback hallmark, and his head is starting to spin to a rhythm of four beats.

But the Master has learned to take what he can get, to clutch it to him, and to refuse to let it go. When the Doctor buries his face in the Master’s chest, he shuts up and holds on.

The Doctor snuffles and sighs, evidently quite prepared to doze off without so much as acknowledging the cataclysmic miracle that just took place.

The Master pokes the Doctor’s forehead.

“Don’t sleep,” he says. After some more mumbled gibberish, he happens on a solution. “We just need to kickstart your blood sugar, idiot.” He reaches behind him, feels for his suit jacket on the bed, finds it, and digs in the inside pocket, then proffers his prize. “Jelly Baby?”

There is a pause, and then there is an odd series of moments where the Doctor seems to be banging his forehead repeatedly against the Master’s collarbones.

The Master leans down, kisses him, draws back when he’s gasping for more, crams Bumper into his open mouth, and pats his cheek.

“Take two of those,” he says, “and call me in the morning.”

“…kill you in the morning,” the Doctor mutters, but his comprehensibility only means the Master’s plan has worked.

At that, he settles, contentedly enough, and the Doctor yawns cavernously and wriggles in closer to him.

This whole hellish-captive-eternity thing is looking up for once.


End file.
